Just so you know what it looks like….and also THANK YOU John and Ellie, yet again.

and the label reads……

and the back warns….

The Pinot Noir however was in good shape and we were able to take a good number of cuttings from them to fill in the holes where the baby pinot vines have not worked.  There was a bit of powdery mildew on the vine leaves this time which is inevitable as we do not follow such a rigourous control program when there is now fruit on the vines as it is too costly. We do however remove all the leaves and stems from the vineyard and dispose of them so as not to contaminate the new growth with spores. Although obviously we cant get it all, we find that this helps us a little.

As always seems to happen we get to pruning one of the lines half way down the slope and the clouds build up. We had 10mm of rain and the next day a further 5mm. Just enough to wet the dust and the grass and get us through to the short rains which should be here by November, in time for our bud break and spring time.

Once we prune the vines we paint the buds with DORMEX. Muia here is well protected as its quite toxic they say.

It been an incredibly frustating month for John Dolier of Naivasha vineyards who has been trying to get the shipment of Dormex through Kenya customs. Dormex is the growth regulator that we paint on the buds just after pruning to force a two week winter. As all the winegrowers in Kenya need Dormex and as we are all about to prune the vines we have had to hold back until this shipment came through. Paper work has taken a long time. It does seem that the government departments concerned continualy add to the list of documents needed to get anything out of the clearing house. But it is now here and we are all set to go.

I will be posting again more frequently ……now that I am back at the farm.

This is the reason that I have not been posting on this site is that I have been away at Lake Turkana in northern Kenya and myself and my assistant Lawrence Nzube have been blogging about our day to day activities in the north finding fossils. If any of you happen to be interested in both wine and fossil exploration (as I am!) then you can also divert your attention from time to time to our other weblog. The vineyard has been in good hands with Michael and Muia while I have been away.

Right across the lake from us incidentally there are some Spaniards and guess what, they make wine. I will have to find out more about them one of these days.

The vine leaves seem to be very discoloured and translucent and I hope we have not put them under too much strain this time. I decided to cut the spurs right back short but from what I can see the Pinot Noir prefers to grow from 4 bud spurs. I took a few pictures of the Pinot Noir a few weeks ago now.

The Chardonnay I think is very upset with the short pruning and we perhaps will consider exfoliating instead next time for these vines rather than biannual pruning. The growth is particularly weak and we may not have the best buds for fruiting. I am not sure if the vines are objecting to a biannual pruning or if they prefer the longer spurs that we left them with on last years biannual pruning .

It is lighter in colour this year but we are very happy with it. It has mostly fallen bright but we added some egg whites to it all the same.

It always feels slightly strange adding egg white and salt to wine but thats what makes it clear without filtration- it works.

Incidentally, when we got into the winery this morning a swarm of African bees were around looking for a good place to build their hive. We soon smoked them out as we had plenty of that around. You might think that our wine might have a distinctive smokey taste to it - but we are bottling indoors and boiling outdoors.

These are the two large aluminium “sufurias” that we boil the clean bottles in for sterilisation. We are reusing bottles at the moment and when we come to commercialising our wine we will have to do this bit quite differently and get new bottles I guess.

However it works very well for now.

We will have to go through the vineyard in a few weeks and pluck off any signs of fruit. I am not sure if one should let the flowers set before we do this or if we should go ahead and do this before hand. Has any one got any thoughts on this?

The holes have also been dug into the terraces and Seiyia conveniently jumped into one of the holes for us to show us how deep it was.

We will be able to put in the rooted cuttings in November whenand if we have our short rains again.

The good thing is that we are not as contrained in this part of the world to one growing season as we have two growing seasons a year to work with. We prune the vines at the end of March and let them grow but do not allow them to fruit, and then we prune again in October and do allow them to fruit. So we have a training season and a fruiting season.

I believe they do this in the vineyards in India too. Does anyone know any more about this?

We have to let the vines build up some reserves although we still focus on allowing the canes closest to the trunk to get most light so that on in the October pruning we can maximise fruit quality as the buds will have been well exposed to sunshine and will be in best condition for fruiting.

I will post some current images from the vineyard and the new spring growth soon.